Picture this: you’re reading a mystery novel, and the detective says, ‘Some of today’s letters have checks inside.’ Your super sleuth brain automatically jumps to the conclusion that not all the letters have checks. But what if I told you that this implicature actually depends on the speaker’s knowledgeability? According to some smarty-pants scientists, if the detective has only examined some of the available letters, you’re less likely to infer that ‘some’ means ‘not all.’ They even did experiments to prove it! But wait, there’s more! These clever researchers found that the speaker’s usage of certain words can also influence how strong the implicature is. For example, if the detective tends to use number words like ‘2’ in similar sentences, you’re even more convinced that ‘some’ means ‘not all.’ Pretty cool, huh? These findings show that it’s not just about the words themselves, but also about the context beyond the sentence. So next time you’re trying to uncover hidden meanings, remember to consider all the clues!

Abstract
The quantifier “some” often elicits a scalar implicature during comprehension: “Some of today’s letters have checks inside” is often interpreted to mean that not all of today’s letters have checks inside. In previous work, Goodman and Stuhlmüller (G&S) proposed a model that predicts that this implicature should depend on the speaker’s knowledgeability: If the speaker has only examined some of the available letters (e.g., two of three letters), people are less likely to infer that “some” implies “not all” than if the speaker has examined all of the available letters. G&S also provided behavioral evidence in support of their model. In this paper, we first show that a simple extension of G&S’s model (1) predicts G&S’s knowledgeability effects, and in addition, (2) predicts that the knowledgeability effect will be reduced when the speaker’s usage indicates numeral alternatives are available. We tested the new model’s predictions in four preregistered experiments. All experiments supported the first model prediction, replicating G&S’s finding of a main effect of the speaker’s knowledge. Further, Experiments 2 and 4 supported the second model prediction showing that the words that a speaker tends to use affect the strength of scalar implicature that comprehenders make. In particular, when the speaker has partial knowledge (e.g., has only examined two of three letters), comprehenders think that “some” is more likely to mean “not all” when the speaker also tends to produce number words in similar sentences (e.g., “2 of today’s rooms have working smoke detectors.”). These results have important ramifications for theories of meaning: the context beyond the sentence (e.g., the speaker’s tendency to use particular words) affects the set of alternatives that comprehenders consider when inferring meaning.

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